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Perley A. Thomas (1874–1958) was a native of Canada and a millwright (specifically in woodworking), by trade. He worked for a subsidiary of the famous streetcar manufacturer J. G. Brill and Company, in Cleveland, Ohio, early in the 20th century, and attended night school courses in structural engineering at Case Institute of Technology then moved south to work for another streetcar builder at its High Point, N.C., location in 1910. Thomas became chief engineer, draftsman and designer for the company, using both his mechanical skills and his experience as a skilled woodworker. When the streetcar industry began to turn from wooden to steel construction, Thomas was able to make the switch, but his employer, Southern Car Company went out of business in 1916.

In 1917, Thomas founded Perley A. Thomas Car Works, Inc., his own streetcar building company using the former facilities and many employees of the Southern Car Company. During the next 20 years, Perley A. Thomas streetcars were built and delivered to communities all across the United States, including New Orleans, where they operated on the Desire line made famous by Tennessee Williams' 1947 Broadway play and later film of the same name, A Streetcar Named Desire.

The national trend in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s was toward use of personal automobiles rather than riding public transportation. As streetcar ridership decreased, less costly buses were often used in substitution by the companies operating the service. Orders for new streetcars and renovations began falling off.

Just as he had made the transition from wooden to steel streetcar building, Thomas and his workers at High Point also made the transition to building buses successfully. In 1934, Duke Power of South Carolina had Thomas build 10 transit buses. In 1936, Thomas ceased production of streetcars and launched a new product: the school bus. The same year, the company built 200 wooden-bodied school buses for the state of North Carolina, beginning a long tradition with that state which continues to the present day.

In the early days of the school bus, Perley Thomas and his company's reputation for design innovation and quality manufacturing helped transform the industry. In the United States, many school buses in the 1930s were nothing more than flatbed truck chassis with wooden sides and a canvas roof, and had few or no safety devices.

In 1938, the company introduced the first welded all-steel bus body. In 1939, Dr. Frank W. Cyr of New York, who became known as "The Father of the Yellow School Bus", hosted a 7 day long national conference of industry and school leaders which established 44 important safety standards and the yellow color for school buses all across the United States.

Thomas Built Buses, Inc. was incorporated in 1972 as the successor to Perley A. Thomas Car Works. Previously dependent upon truck chassis made by other companies for its bodies (particularly Ford, Dodge, GMC, International Harvester and even Volvo), in 1978, Thomas introduced its first bus chassis and began producing its popular Saf-T-Liner transit-style bus for school and commercial use. In 1980, the company began to manufacture a smaller conventional school bus on a cutaway van chassis, the Thomas Minotour. It entered the commercial public transit bus market in the 1980s, developed the Thomas Vista school bus, a modified conventional design providing improved front-end visibility for drivers, and its MVP line, a less expensive version of its transit-style school bus in the 1990s.

By the end of the 20th century, Thomas was one of only three principal builders of large school buses in the United States. It is still based in High Point, and in 1998, was acquired by the Freightliner Group of Daimler AG. Thomas employs over 1,600 people worldwide.

In 2004, Perley A. Thomas, founder of the Thomas streetcar and bus building companies, who died in 1958, was among the first inductees into the Raleigh-based, North Carolina Transportation Hall of Fame.

In 1996 Thomas launched the FS-65 conventional school bus which had different options for engines. The original options were Caterpillar and Cummins. Later, a Mercedes-Benz engine was offered as an option. The FS-65 was used throughout many districts around the US. The last FS-65 was produced and delivered on December 13, 2006 to O'Brien Bus Service, Inc. of Maryland.[1]

In 2009, Thomas launched a new Type A design geared specifically towards the activity bus market called the MyBus. [2] It is available in 3 sizes on a GM chassis[3].

Until the early 2000s, Thomas Built Buses was the exclusive provider of school buses to the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, who was the school bus purchasing agent for all public school districts in North Carolina. Thomas Built technically bid on the buses, but because the state had a policy of purchasing goods built in-state before purchasing from out-of-state vendors (Thomas Built Buses are manufactured in High Point, North Carolina), Thomas Built won the contracts. Somewhere around the time of the merger of Thomas Built and Daimler, complaints began to roll in from county bus garages that the quality of Thomas Built Buses had gone down and that they were spending too much of their transportation budgets on repairs and other parts. The state finally allowed the districts to order from other manufacturers, although only one manufacturer was approved by the state: the International Chassis (IC Corporation) division of Navistar. Thomas has seemed to have since corrected their quality issues, and NC still buys far more Thomas Built Buses than IC.